THE MEG Review Round-Up: Is Jason Statham's Giant Shark Movie Worth Sinking Your Teeth Into?

The Meg” lacks the imagination to be shameless. Directed by the veteran plodder Jon Turteltaub (“National Treasure,” “Phenomenon”), it goes right back to the template of vastly scaled but chintzy ’70s disaster movies: a busy ensemble of instantly scannable and forgettable characters, working (in this case) at an underwater research facility known as Mana One, enmeshed in cardboard dramas we could scarcely care less about.

Blandly internationalized, generically derivative, drained of any personality, edited as if by computer and bleached of the slightest hint of emotion other than a holiday card-like sympathy for children and allegedly cute animals, The Meg is a one hundred percent inorganic meal, something made from pre-tasted and then regurgitated ingredients. It's true that some people like institutional food, but those allergic to cardboard must steer clear.

Never anything more or less than what you'd expect, 'The Meg' doesn't bite off any more than it can chew and knows to swim in familiar waters than venture out into uncharted territory. It's safe, it's dependable, it's enjoyable.

Like director Jon Turteltaub’s underrated National Treasure movies, The Meg has an innate understanding of its own absurdity, and is at its best when it embraces and amplifies that impulse. It includes the line “It’s a great day to go fishing!” It has a water-bound chase between a tiny dog and a giant shark. It has a scene where a little shark swims out of the mouth of a bigger shark. And, God bless it, it has an entire sequence where Jason Statham and the Meg get into an underwater dogfight.

As unabashedly ridiculous as the movie is, one imagines that anyone who's been sold on The Meg since they first learned what it's about - namely, a throw-down between the star of The Transporter trilogy and a 75-foot + long ancient shark - should walk away with a big grin on their face, after seeing it.

It may not shock you to hear this, but The Meg — a movie that apparently exists just so people can make jokes about Jason Statham punching a giant shark — is a bad film. Shark. Weak.

I’ll be honest, The Meg isn’t nearly as good (or as white-knuckle gory) as the movie I had imagined in my head. The CGI is mediocre at best, and a romantic subplot with a single-mom scientist (Li Bingbing) is sentimental hooey. But it is ridiculous, cheesy popcorn fun. And Statham, God bless him, knows exactly what kind of guilty pleasure he’s signed on for.

Audiences in the mood to be scared will certainly send their popcorn flying during a few tense moments of “The Meg.” But they’ll also wish the movie had bothered to find an equivalent to Robert Shaw’s USS Indianapolis speech in “Jaws.” When the human characters are reduced to chum, it’s hard to care about them getting eaten.

Turteltaub’s direction never suggests that it’s motivated by anything except commercial and contractual considerations. The Meg is lackadaisically paced, dull to look at, and has trouble keeping track of space and plot

There are some glorious highs in The Meg, and yet you always feel like it could go a little further, be more bonkers, shave off some of the runtime and go a little grislier with the chomping.